Emmaus

by Alessandro Baricco

  I knew where they planned to go. There was an exasperatingly long, stony ascent before the approach to the real summit. Walking on stony ground is a penance—I saw the Saint’s hand in it; it was his kind of thing. He wanted a penance. But also the light, probably—the light on stony ground is the true light of the earth. And he also wanted the strange sensation that we know up there, as of some soft thing that’s left, unmoving, saved from a spell, the last thing, floating.

  With some envy, I watched them leave. We know enough to observe the nuances. Bobby had a strange way of performing the small acts of departure—he always showed up with the wrong shoes, like one who doesn’t entirely want to go. I asked if he was sure he wanted to go and he shrugged his shoulders. It didn’t seem to matter much to him.

  The first night they camped on the edge of the stony ground. They put up the tent when it was dark, and the Saint’s backpack, lying on a rock, rolled off. It was slightly open, and the few things for the journey slipped out. But, in the light of the gas lantern, there was also a metallic gleam that Bobby didn’t immediately recognize. The Saint went to put the things back in the pack, then returned to the tent.

  What are you doing with a gun, Bobby asked, but smiling.

  Nothing, said the Saint.

  It was partly that, but probably even more the words during the night. In the morning they started to climb among the rocks, without speaking, two strangers. The Saint has an implacable way of walking, climbing steadily, silently. Bobby stayed behind—the wrong shoes didn’t help. A wind rose from the east and then rain. The cold was bitter. The Saint walked at an even pace, taking short, regular breaks—he never turned. From behind, at a certain point, Bobby shouted something. The Saint turned. Bobby yelled that he was fed up, he was going back. The Saint shook his head and nodded at him, to tell him to cut it out and keep walking, but Bobby didn’t want to hear about it, he was yelling, in the voice of one near tears. Then the Saint descended a few meters, slowly, looking carefully where he put his feet. The rain was falling obliquely, and cold. He got within a few large rocks of Bobby, and asked him in a loud voice what the hell was happening.

  Nothing, Bobby answered, it’s just that I’m turning back.

  The Saint came a little closer, but kept a few meters away. You can’t do that, he said. Of course I can do it. In fact, you should, too, let’s get out of here, it’s a shitty hike.

  But it wasn’t a hike for the Saint; they aren’t hikes for us who believe—there is nothing worse than to call them hikes. They are our liturgical rites. So the Saint felt that something had broken irremediably, and he wasn’t wrong. He said to Bobby that he felt sorry for him.

  Look at you, you shit fanatic, Bobby answered.

  They weren’t really shouting, but the wind forced them to talk in loud voices. They stood for a while unmoving, not knowing. Then the Saint turned and started to climb again, without a word. Bobby let him go and then began to yell at him that he was crazy, he thought he was a saint, eh?, but he wasn’t, everyone knew very well that he wasn’t, he and his whores!

  The Saint kept climbing, it seemed he wasn’t even listening, but at a certain point he stopped. He took off the backpack, set it on the ground, opened it, leaned over to get something, and then stood up with the gun clutched in his right hand. Bobby! he shouted. They were far apart, and there was the wind, so he had to shout. Take it, he cried. And he threw him the gun, so that he would take it.

  Bobby let it fall among the rocks. Guns scared him. He watched it ricochet on the hard ground and then roll into a hole. When Bobby turned toward the Saint, he saw him from behind, slowly climbing. For a while he didn’t understand, but then it occurred to him that the Saint didn’t want to be alone with his gun. And he felt a great tenderness for the Saint, as he watched him growing smaller on the stony ground. But he didn’t change his mind; he didn’t start climbing again, and knew that it would be like that forever.

  He went to get the gun. Although he loathed it, he put it in his backpack, so that it would disappear from there and from every solitary place where the Saint might pass. Then he set off on the return trip.

  I know this story because Bobby told it to me, with all the details. He wanted to explain to me that probably everything had already happened before, at the slow pace of geological movement, but in the end it was among the rocks that he understood, suddenly, that it was all over. He referred to something we know well—the imprecise expression we use is losing one’s faith. It’s our nightmare. At every moment along our path we know that something might happen, similar to a total eclipse—losing our faith.

  However much the priests can teach us about this possibility, it’s comprehensible only if you go back to the experience of the first apostles. They were only a few, the ones closest to Christ, and the day after Calvary, when their Master was taken down from the cross, they gathered together, distraught. It should be remembered that they felt the most human sorrow for the loss of something dear: but no more. None of them, at that moment, were aware that it was not a friend or a prophet or a teacher who had died—but God. It was something they didn’t understand. Evidently it wasn’t within their capacity to imagine that that man was truly God. So they came together, that day, after Calvary, very simply in memory of a beloved and irreplaceable person who had been lost. But the Holy Spirit came upon them from heaven. Thus, suddenly, the veil was torn, and they understood. They now recognized the God with whom they had walked for years, and you can imagine how every little tile of life at that instant returned to their minds, in a light so dazzling that it flung them open, to their depths and forever. In the New Testament, that opening comes to us in the beautiful metaphor of glossolalia: they were suddenly able to speak all the languages of the world—it was a known phenomenon, and connected to the figure of the seer, the soothsayer. It was the seal of a magical comprehension.

  Thus, what the priests teach us is that faith is a gift, which comes from on high and belongs to the world of mystery. For this reason it is fragile, like a vision—and, like a vision, untouchable. It is a supernatural event.

  Yet we know that it is not so.

  We obey the doctrine of the Church, but we also know a different story, one whose roots go back to the docile land that produced us. From somewhere, and in an invisible way, our unhappy families passed on to us an immutable instinct to believe that life is an immense experience. The more modest the habit they handed down, the more profound, every day, was their buried call to an ambition without limits—an almost irrational sense of expectation. So from childhood we approached the world with the precise intention of restoring it to greatness. We demand that it be just, noble, steady in reaching toward the best, and unstoppable on the path of creation. This makes us rebels, and different. The world outside appears to us for the most part a humiliating, arid duty, completely inadequate to our hopes. In the lives of those who do not believe we see the routine of the condemned, and in their every single gesture we perceive a parody of the humanity we dream of. Any injustice is an insult to our expectations—every sorrow, spite, meanness, brutality. So is any passage without sense—and every man without hope or nobility. Every petty act. Every moment lost.

  So, long before God, we believe in man—and this alone, in the beginning, is faith.

  It emerges in us in the form of a battle—we are in opposition, we are different, we are mad. What pleases others disgusts us, and what others despise is precious to us. Needless to say, that energizes us. We grow up with the idea of being heroes, yet of a strange type, which does not derive from the classic typology of the hero—we do not love weapons, or violence, or animal struggle. We are female heroes, because we slip into the brawl bare-handed, strong in our childlike candor and invincible in our attitude of irritating modesty. We crawl among the toothed wheels of the world with our heads high but with the step of the humble—the same revoltingly humble and firm step with which Jesus of Nazareth walked the world for all his public life, establishing, before a religious d
octrine, a model of behavior. Invincible, as history has shown.

  In the depths of this upside-down epic we find God. It’s a natural step, which comes by itself. We believe so much in every creature that it’s instinctive to think of a creation—a knowing act that we call by the name of God. Thus our faith is not so much a magical and uncontrollable event as a linear deduction—the extension into infinity of an inherited instinct. Seekers of meaning, we are pushed far, and at the end of the journey is God—the total fullness of meaning. Very simple. If we happen to lose that simplicity, the Gospels help us, because in them our journey from man to God is fixed forever in a definite model, where the rebel son of man coincides with the chosen son of God, the two fused into a single heroic flesh. What might be madness in us is there revelation and destiny fulfilled—perfect ideogram. We get from it a certainty without edges—we call it faith.

  To lose it is something that happens. But I use here an imprecise expression, which alludes to faith as enchantment, which has nothing to do with us. I will not lose faith, Bobby can’t lose it. We haven’t found it, we can’t lose it. It’s something different, not magical at all. What comes to mind is the geometric crumbling of a wall—the instant when one point of the structure gives way and the whole thing collapses. Because the stone wall is solid, but in its heart there is always a weak joint, an insecure support. Over time we have learned exactly where—the hidden stone that can betray us. It’s at the exact point where we place our every heroism, and every religious sentiment: it’s where we reject the world of others, where we despise it, out of instinctive certainty, where we know, with utter clarity, that it’s meaningless. Only God is enough for us, things never. But it’s not always true, it’s not true for always. Sometimes it takes just the elegance of another’s gesture, or the gratuitous beauty of a secular word. The sparkle of life, found in the wrong destinies. The nobility of evil, at times. A light filters through that we would not have suspected. The rock-like certainty breaks, and everything crumbles. I’ve seen it in many, I saw it in Bobby. He told me—there are a lot of true things around us, and we don’t see them, they are there, and have meaning, without any need for God.

  Give me an example, I said.

  You, me, as we truly are, not as we pretend to be.

  Give me another.

  Andre, and even the people around her.

  You think people like that have a meaning?

  Yes.

  Why?

  They are real.

  We aren’t?

  No.

  He meant that in the absence of meaning the world still turns. And in the acrobatics of existing without coordinates there is a beauty, even a nobility, sometimes, that we don’t recognize—like a heroism that we’ve never thought of, the heroism of some truth. If you recognize this as you look at the world, even once, then you are lost—there is now a different battle, for you. Growing up in the certainty of being heroes, we become memorable in other legends. God vanishes, like a childish expedient.

  Bobby told me that that rocky slope in the mountains had suddenly seemed to him what remained of a ruined fortress. There was no way to walk up it, he said.

  We then saw him slip slowly into the distance, but never with his back turned, his eyes still on us, his friends. You would have said that he would return, after a while. We never thought that we would see him truly disappear. But he left the larvae, at the hospital, and all the rest. He still came to play sometimes in church, then nothing. I did the bass parts on the keyboard. It wasn’t the same, but above all our growing up wasn’t the same, without him. He had a lightness we didn’t.

  One day he came back to tell us about his show with Andre, if we really wanted to see it. We said yes, and that changed our lives.

  It was in a theater outside the city, an hour by car to a small town of dull streets and houses, surrounded by countryside. Provincial. But with an old-fashioned theater, in the square, with boxes and all—a horseshoe. Maybe there were some people from the place, but mainly it was friends and relatives who had come for the show, as if for a wedding, greeting one another at the entrance. We were apart, because there were a lot of them—those whom Bobby called real, while we were not. They disgusted me again anyway.

  Nor did the show seem much better to us. With all good will. But it wasn’t something we could understand. Besides Andre, there was Bobby playing, some slides projected onto the background, and three other dancers, who were normal people, or even deformed—bodies devoid of beauty. They didn’t dance, unless that was dancing, moving according to rules and a precise plan. Every so often other, recorded sounds and noises mixed with Bobby’s bass. Cries, all of a sudden—and in the finale.

  Bobby’s bass still had the Gandhi decal on it—this pleased me. But it was true that he played differently, not only the notes but the prop for his foot, the curve of his back, and above all his face, which was searching and without embarrassment, as if forgetful of the audience—a private face. You saw there, if you wished, Bobby as he was, since he had stopped being Bobby. We looked at him fascinated. The Saint laughed every so often, but softly, in embarrassment.

  Then there was Andre. She was in her movements, completely—a body. What I could understand was that she was looking for some necessity that would put the movements in order, as if she had decided to substitute for chance, or naturalness, a sort of necessity, which would hold them together, one inevitably dictating the next. But then who knows. Another thing you could say is that there was a particular, at times hypnotic intensity wherever she was; we knew it, we had seen it in performances at school, but it’s not something you can get used to. It takes you by surprise every time, and so it was then while she was dancing.

  I should add that it was just as Bobby had said: it didn’t mean anything, there was no story, or message, nothing, only that apparent necessity. Yet at a certain point Andre was lying on the floor, on her back, and when she got up she let fall the loose white shirt she was wearing, a snake shedding its skin, and became naked before our eyes. And so was given to us, with nothing in exchange, what we had always thought outside our reach—leaving us bewildered. Naked, Andre moved, and, whatever way we sat in the theater seats, it was suddenly inappropriate, even where we put our hands. I tried to keep my eyes steady in an effort to watch the whole scene, but they sought instead the details of the body, to seize the unexpected gift. There was also the vague sensation that it wouldn’t last, and therefore urgency, and disappointment when she approached her shirt. But she left it on the floor and moved away again—she avoided it. I don’t know if she knew what she was doing with our eyes. Maybe it didn’t matter to her, maybe that wasn’t the heart of the thing. But it was for us—it should be noted that I, for example, had seen a naked girl four times in my life I had counted. And she was Andre, not a girl. So we looked at her—and the point was that we got nothing sexual from it, nothing that had to do with desire, as if our gaze were detached from the rest of our body, and this seemed to me a kind of magic, that a body could pose like that, naked, as if it were a pure force, not a naked body. Even when I looked between her legs—and I dared to do it because she allowed me to—there was no sex for a long time, as if it had disappeared, only an unheard-of proximity, unthinkable. And this, I seemed to understand, was the only message, the only story that had been told to me on that stage. That business of the naked body. Before the end, Andre dressed again, but slowly, in a man’s suit, down to the tie—something symbolic, I imagine. The blond triangle between her thighs disappeared last, in the dark pants with the crease, and it was during that long act of dressing that coughing could be heard in the hall, as of people returning from a distance—so we were aware of the special silence before.

  Afterward we went to the dressing rooms. Bobby seemed happy. He embraced us all.

  Good? he asked.

  Strange, said Luca. But he had barely finished saying it when he had taken Bobby’s head in his hands, and leaned his forehead against his, rubbing it a little—we d
on’t make gestures like that, usually, don’t bring in bodies between males, when we yield to tenderness, to emotion.

  And the Saint, what does the Saint say? asked Bobby.

  The Saint was a step behind. He smiled beautifully, and began to shake his head. You’re great, he said, between his teeth.

  Come here, you shit, said Bobby, and went to embrace him.

  I don’t know, it was all strange—we were better.

  Andre came over then, she came to us, she had made up her mind to. My friends, said Bobby, vaguely. She halted a step away, nodded yes with her head. She was enveloped in a bathrobe, her feet bare. The band, she said, but without disdain—she was noting something. Bobby introduced me first, then Luca, finally the Saint. She stood looking at the Saint, and he didn’t look away. They seemed on the point of saying something, both of them. But someone passing by embraced Andre from behind, it was one of those others, all smiles. He told her how beautiful she had been, took her away. Andre said to us one more thing like, Are you really staying? Then she left.

  Staying—that was something Bobby had trapped us into. We didn’t dare say no, in that period, and he had invited us to go with him, after the performance, to a house of Andre’s, a big country house, to sleep—there was a party, and then a bed to sleep in. We don’t go readily to others’ houses overnight, we don’t like the intimacy with others’ things—the smells, the used toothbrushes in the bathroom. We don’t even go willingly to parties, which aren’t very suitable for our singular form of heroism. But we had said yes—we would surely find a way out, this is what we thought.

  But people were streaming toward that house, a few kilometers away, in a procession of cars, many of them sports cars. So we couldn’t find a loophole to escape through. A polite loophole. We found ourselves at the party, where we didn’t really know how to behave. The Saint silently began to drink, and it seemed to us a good solution. Then it became easier. There were some people we knew. I, for example, ran into a friend of my girlfriend. She asked about her, why she wasn’t there: We’re not much together anymore, I said. Then let’s dance, she said, as if it were a natural consequence, the only one. I pulled Luca along, not the Saint, who was talking intently to an old man with long hair—they kept leaning toward each other to pierce the music, which was very loud. In that music we started to dance. Bobby saw us, and seemed content, as if with a problem solved. I, at every passing song, thought it was the last, but then I kept going—Luca came close and shouted in my ear that we were making people laugh, but he meant to convey the opposite, that we were wonderful, and maybe he was right. I don’t know how, but I found myself sitting down at the end, next to the friend of my girlfriend. All sweaty, watching the dancing, beating time with our heads. There was no way to talk, we didn’t talk. She turned, put her arms around my neck, and kissed me. She had lovely soft lips, she kissed as if she were thirsty. She kept on for a while, and I liked it. Then she went back to looking at people, maybe holding my hand, I don’t remember. I was thinking of that kiss, I didn’t even know what it was. She got up and started dancing again.